A year of surprises, but IoT continues to dominate

12th December 2016

Joe Bush

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This is the time of year when many look forward and make a series of predictions and resolutions. Well, what a year of surprises 2016 has turned out to be and it really does highlight the difficulties facing those tasked with planning for the future.

Who could possibly have thought that the UK would vote to leave the European Union, that the United States of America would elect Donald J Trump as its 45th President and Leicester City would be crowned as English Premier League Champions? Anyone who may have had a bet on all these three unforeseen events would surely have made a small fortune.

However, as many people predicted towards the end of last year, the Internet of Things has continued to dominate the electronics landscape and has been the subject of millions of column inches globally and the basis of many events.

Security around the IoT is the issue that continues to grab the most headlines and this was very much the theme of electronica’s flagship forum, the CEO Roundtable. This is where leading industry executives come together to debate a subject of significant importance to the electronics industry. Two years ago at electronica 2014, it was devoted to the topic - ‘Internet of Things: Possibilities, Challenges and the Question of Security’.

Well not a lot has changed in the past two years, since the theme at this year’s event was ‘Connected Worlds - Safe and Sound’. This time, key figures from the semiconductor industry, OEMS and the scientific sector rightly considered that this showed that security is highly complex and can only be achieved in close collaboration with the IT industry.

No surprise there then. However, among the interesting things to come out of electronica this time around was the results of a survey among 7,000 consumers in seven countries including a representative group of 1,000 Germans. Although electronica surveys do obviously tend to be German-centric, it does seem to show that Germans are more concerned about security than other nations.

Three quarters of Germans are calling for devices that regularly update their own software to protect themselves against cyber attacks. By comparison, the results show that in Japan, only about half of all consumers are demanding corresponding anti-hacker protection, while the figure is about 65% in France and the UK and about 70% in Italy, the US and China.

We reckon it’s a safe bet to predict that the 2018 CEO Roundtable will also be about…you’ve guessed it… IoT security.